Thread

I am not sure if this is best for the General Discussion or the CodeShare Corner, but I am putting it here since its not terribly code specific so far.

I run a site on Expression Engine and a forum on IPB. Up until now, it hasn’t been so much of an issue that the two aren’t at all integrated. However, now we’ve started using the site to cover a more news-intensive project which also sparks a fair bit of discussion for each news item, and we’ve had a lot of people sigh about the lack of integration.

What we do right now is import each post into a specific IPB forum via IPB’s ability to import posts via RSS. That works fine for visitors who mainly visit the forum. But for those who visit the site first, they find it frustrating that all we can provide is a generic “discuss this at our forum” link as opposed to a link straight to the post.

Are there any solutions out there that accomplishes posting an EE entry to IPB while also including with the post the link to the post on the forum? Or is this not at all doable?

Just giving this one a bump to check if anyone out there has any information to share?

Hi Linda,

I’ve got the same set up as yourself - a site in EE and a forum in IPB and I often post a blog post or write a new article that I’d like people to discuss in the forums.

At the moment I have to do it manually as I’ve not found a way to automatically post a forum post once I’ve created a weblog entry in EE. What I have done (but not tried out) is to think about how to use RSS feeds to do a little bit of pseudo integration. At the moment, I call in the titles of the top 3 forums posts into my homepage but I’m convinced this can be taken further.

I do believe (and it’s been a while since I checked) that you can set up IPB to create posts from RSS feeds. So perhaps you could look into this? You may be able to set it up so that EE publishes your weblog post as an RSS feed and IPB picks it up. It will likely result in your blog post being duplicated in the forums which is not really the best way to go about it admittedly. Another thing I’ve thought of doing is to call in the posts from a particular forum topic as an RSS feed into the bottom of the blog post so that they would appear to be comments on the post. This would mean your users would have to log into the forum to actually join in the discussion. However, I’ve only found RSS feeds from IPB for topics, and not the posts in the topics.

So sorry, no really helpful answer there but I thought I’d share my thinking on it as I want to do the same thing as yourself.

Hi 😊

I do have it setup so that IPB imports posts from designated RSS feeds created by EE. But, yeah, the main issue is how to smoothly transition users to discussing the post on the forum. I don’t have my EE site setup to allow member registrations (I had not envisioned that from the start, and now its not suitable), so feedback on posts has to happen on the forums. But since I can’t point directly from the blog post to the forum post created by the RSS import, people really aren’t seeing the connection at all and we feel that the site is losing traffic because no immediate discussion option is offered and the forum is losing out on potential discussions.

I don’t know if it would be at all possible to feed the RSS from IPB back into EE so that the blog post can grab a link to the post that matches the title of the blog post. It sounds like it ought to be doable, though… Hrm, maybe that could be an angle to take, see if there’s an EE solution that can analyze an external RSS feed and create a link the post that matches a certain title. I may post a separate topic on this.